Circling back around

A few updates on previous posts:

Remember the plant in my front yard I puzzled over a few months ago? I learned last weekend that it is, in fact, a canna lily. I think a couple of you suggested that, but now it's in full bloom and a green-thumbed girlfriend of mine confirmed. Check it out now -- in most parts, it's not even dead!

Update No. 2: Remember when I accidentally bought a $5,000 trip to Cancun? Well, as of about 25 minutes ago, the trip is booked, set for early June. Funny, any queasiness I had about that price tag melted right away when I saw the American Airlines confirmation e-mail littered with the words "first" and "class."

And speaking of price tags, let's fondly recall when I went to the hospital for food poisoning and was literally stabbed in the back. Got the bill for that little excursion. Turns out a five-hour ER bed rental, one lumbar puncture, a couple X-rays and a morphine drip will run you around $23,064. That's right, five digits of sheer agony. Wonder how much Dr. Psycho's cut was. No mention of the crippling, six-day post-lumbar headache -- maybe they threw that in for free, since I was such a good customer! Now, I had insurance, so after my $100 copay I'm in the clear. However, there's some suspicious wording on the one-page bill that says more than $21K of this is "in excess of the allowed expense for a participating provider." So that means I paid $100, the insurance company paid around $900, and the rest? Poof! I dunno what kind of crazy voodoo math shit that is, but thank you, American Health Care System, for keeping me out of it!